Rabbi Yanklowitz is founder and president of Uri L'Tzedek, director of Jewish life and senior Jewish educator at UCLA Hillel.

Today and tomorrow (June 18 and 19), I am fasting as an individual in solidarity with tens of thousands of American individuals in solitary confinement. I am also fasting in solidarity with hundreds of faith leaders across the country calling for an end of solitary confinement.

Tomorow is a historic day, as the Senate will be holding its first-ever Congressional hearing on solitary confinement. Leaders from Uri L’Tzedek, RHR-NA, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, and other clergy around the country will be fasting for 23 hours prior to the hearing to draw attention to the physical and emotional harm caused by prolonged solitary confinement.

The fast symbolizes the 23 hours prisoners spend in solitary confinement cells daily. We view this as an important opportunity to advocate on behalf of the tens of thousands of individuals languishing in solitary confinement across the country.

We have seen in recent prisoner hunger strikes in California, Virginia, and across the country that prisoners are refusing food as one of the few means they have to protest their conditions in solitary confinement.

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, the Senate’s Assistant Majority Leader, will chair this first-ever hearing on the human rights, fiscal and public safety consequences of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, jails, and detention centers. At this hearing (open to the public), they will explore the detrimental psychological and psychiatric impact on inmates during and after their imprisonment, the exorbitant costs of running solitary housing units, the moral human rights issues surrounding the use of isolation, and some of the successful state reforms that have taken place.

The United States is a world leader in its use of prolonged solitary confinement. This extreme treatment had been used sparingly for more than 150 years. However, after a federal supermax facility to hold inmates exclusively for solitary confinement opened in 1983 in Marion, IL, the number of state facilities mirrored the exploding prison population over the next generation. There are now 44 state-run supermax prisons, and at least 80,000 people in the U.S. criminal justice system are kept in solitary confinement on any given day, with some serving for years, even decades.

From 1995 to 2000, the growth rate of these segregation units significantly surpassed the prison growth rate overall: 40 percent compared with 28 percent. While authorities claim that this is necessary due to the presence of gangs and other violent offenders, the reality is that the United States has decided to quadruple its prison population (now the largest in the world), while not providing adequate funding. Thus, throwing prisoners in solitary confinement for even minor violations is now the norm.

University of California at Santa Cruz Psychology Professor Craig Haney studied 100 solitary confinement inmates at a California supermax, and found that 90 percent experienced “irrational anger,” thirty times the rate found in Americans who are not in prison. A high percentage of the inmates also experienced lethargy, depression and despair to the point where they were unable to initiate any activity. Since the United Nations Convention Against Torture defines torture as an intentional act that causes “severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental,” then surely solitary confinement is torture.

We use a hunger strike because it is a time-honored tradition among those seeking redress for social injustice. Over the past century in Asia, for example, the hunger strike has been used by Mohandas Gandhi (India), Benazir Bhutto (Pakistan), and Aung Suu Kyi (Myanmar) to protest religious warfare and the suppression of civil liberties. In the United State, Cesar Chavez was noted for his hunger strikes to promote labor and civil rights for Latinos in the Southwest.

n addition, it is not well known that Alice Paul and her group of militant suffragists, the National Woman’s Party, engaged in a hunger strike after being jailed for picketing in front of the White House in 1917-1918 in an effort to get President Wilson to support a federal woman suffrage amendment. In addition to enduring force-feeding, many were put in solitary confinement, and Paul had the added torture of having a flashlight shined in her face every hour of the day. In spite of opposition from moderate suffragists and those who saw picketing during wartime as unpatriotic, Paul and her organization witnessed the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote by Congress a year later, and its eventual ratification in 1920.

Jewish values are opposed to the abuse of prisoners and to the practice of solitary confinement. The rabbis teach us that one important way to inspire mercy from above is to take fasts upon ourselves. We do so with trepidation and caution to remember the frailty of the human condition and to stand in solidarity with all who are suffering.

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My spouse is incourt-mandated detention, where even in his terminal medical condition he is placed in solitary, as he pleas for his rights as a French citizen, in downtown Miami. For almost 3 years now, we have been waiting for next weeks Plea hearing and as ICU/Chemo patient hospital (Jackson Memorial in Miami) waiting for freedom or deportation.

My husband's mental condition has decayed, along with his health, undergoing at least 8 episodes of solitary confinement (sick for 26 yrs. with hospital transfusion-acquired illnesses and now stomach and liver cancer). The brutality of a system where Eliyahu is placed in solitary after complaining that his Talit Katan or Tefillin have been lost or misplaced, after not getting his Kosher rations and having to subsist on almost air - - the brutality is too much to bear, so our blog explains how he got sick and how we ended up here: arttzaddikim.blogspot.com

What are the alternatives to controlling violent prisoners? Flogging? Calling names? Forcing them to listen to Rap Music? Forcing them to listen to Classical Music? Forcing them to listen to 24 hours of Rabbi's speeches?
Obviously, any punishment can be abused, but with the violent society, in and out of our prisons, solitary confinement must be a part of the mix. We cannot micromanage the people who have to deal with this problem.

While I agree that solitary confinement can be psychologically and physically harmful to the prisoner, I have to keep in mind that beating, stabbing, shooting, and selling narcotics to people is also harmful psychologically and physically. Many of these people in solitary confinement have not only harmed innocent civilians, but guards and other inmates while incarcerated. They are in solitary confinement because their actions have dictated that they can not be in the general population.

You have written several articles on prision conditions, and while they are informative about the situation many prisioners find themselves in they are very light on alternatives. What would you recommend we do with a prisioner who is in prision for violence, is continuing to commit violence while incarcerated, and has no intention of changing his behavior?